Husband for Hire (12 page)

“Because honesty is the only reason to do anything.”

What a strange thing to say, she thought. Apprehension spread over her like a heat rash as they drew nearer and nearer to the town. She saw things that tugged her back into the past, awakening memories, like the Munchkins of Oz coming out of hiding.

It was just an ordinary western town, she realized with some surprise, smaller than she remembered, but not quite so drab, either. People went about their business, but she didn’t recognize anyone. There was the bridal shop where she had worked, spending every free moment poring over travel brochures, dreaming of the places she would go one day. And there was the Twisted Scissors Salon and Beauty School where she had cheerfully learned her trade because it was a good way to bring money in while Jake went to school.

Then it would be her turn.

She had been unbelievably trusting back then. She was more than making up for that mistake now. She trusted no one—yet she had allowed Rob Carter to coax her onto a horse. That was something, at least.

Each chair in the Twisted Scissors was occupied, but from a distance she couldn’t see any faces. Some of the women were probably getting ready for the reunion tonight.

Twyla kept looking around, wondering if a passer-by would recognize her. But the young mothers pushing strollers, the guys on the sidewalk in front of the feed store, and the bank teller smoking a cigarette outside the bank hardly gave her and Rob a second glance.

Funny, she had felt like a bug under a magnifying glass seven years ago when everything had fallen apart. Now she was just some woman passing through.

Hell Creek High School was at the edge of town. An ordinary place of brick and mortar, marred by the scars and scuff marks of teenage exuberance. Shreds of crepe paper draped the entrance to the ball field, and a sign, already fading in the strong sunlight, proclaimed Congratulations 1999 Grads.

She pulled up on the reins, just as Rob had shown her. Mabel lurched to a halt beneath a shade tree, dropped her head and tugged indolently at a clump of grass.

“There it is,” she said. “My alma mater.” She regarded the concrete footpaths in a wagon-wheel array, the park benches lining the walk. Somewhere her initials were carved in the seat of a bench. TM + JB = 4-EVER. Hard to imagine that she had once believed in forever.

“I recall every detail,” she said wonderingly. “The way the hallways smelled of disinfectant, the scratching of chalk on a blackboard, the sound of kids stampeding to the lunchroom, everything.” She stared across ten years at the girl she had been. “I thought I was something back then. Really something.”

“You were,” Rob said. “Still are.”

“Oh, yeah.” She spoke lightly, but a strange sadness swept through her. She missed that girl, that laughing, eager girl who believed anything was possible and who was limited only by the boundaries of her dreams. There was something magical about holding an unshakable belief in oneself.

She wondered if anyone actually retained that belief long into adulthood. Thinking of her father, she thought, yes. It was possible, but was it wise?

“Seen enough?” she called to Rob.

He sat on his horse some distance away, a far-off ex
pression on his face. She wondered what he saw when he looked at the past. Part of her wished she knew him well enough to ask.

He swung to face her, tipping back his hat. And said the one thing she had been dreading all day. “Show me where you used to live.”

T
WYLA WANTED TO REFUSE
him, but she couldn’t. He’d come a long way with her, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t because the Hell Creek High School’s ten-year reunion sounded like a great time. Besides, for reasons of his own, he had shown her a glimpse of his own past. Walking with him through the cabins and dorms at Lost Springs had taught her more about this man than she could learn from doing his hair for five years. She could only imagine what it had cost him to return to a place full of such bittersweet memories.

With a tug of the reins, she turned Mabel down a tree-lined street. Until today, she’d never understood the appeal of horseback riding, though she’d grown up in a place where it was common. There hadn’t been room for a horse at the Lazy Acres Mobile Home Court.

The uncomplaining responsiveness of the horse had a calming effect on her. The unhurried walk allowed the sights to unfold gradually. Somehow, nothing seen from the saddle could intimidate her.

They passed houses where kids she used to envy had lived. The older wooden homes on tree-lined streets had the sort of solid permanence she’d never known.

Jake was going to buy her one of those houses once his career at the Jackson law firm took off. It was one of many promises he’d broken.

At the end of the main road, the shade trees thinned
to weedy, unkempt shrubs, the territory of her youth. A half-empty industrial park with dismantled engines and odd auto parts strewn around marked the edge of town. After that was a surprise. Something new. Unexpected.

“A drive-through funeral parlor?” Rob scratched his head.

“That’s what it looks like.” She felt a horrified sense of amusement. The place looked as polished and prosperous as a graduate with a new haircut. The area had been professionally landscaped with little hillocks covered in bark mulch and planted with flowering shrubs and small trees. The long, low building was as discreet as a whisper, camouflaged in the landscape with natural earth tones and river-rock walkways. The drive-around had a tinted glass viewing window. She wondered if a sensor was triggered when a car drove over the barrier, turning on the light. Without even getting out of the car, mourners could send condolences via a tube, like making a deposit at the bank.

“You missed your calling, Daddy,” she said softly. “You would’ve made a killing with this.” She laughed darkly at her own pun.

“He would have?”

“He owned this piece of property, a hundred acres going back to the riverbank,” she explained. “It was repossessed when my father…died.” She almost said “was killed,” but she didn’t want to get into that with Rob. “He tried a little of everything on this lot. One year it was growing jojoba beans because he read somewhere they were the next big boom in farming. Oh, and that thing over at the river’s edge is where he was going to put in an emu barn.” She pointed to a broken concrete slab in the distance.

“Emus?”

“You know, those big birds with long skinny feathers that look like dreadlocks. He was convinced emu was going to take the place of beef as the ‘other red meat,’ but he never did sell a one of them. I think he imprinted the first hatchlings. They followed him around like a flock of six-foot ducklings.” Seeing Rob’s face, she laughed. “I’m not kidding. Eventually he donated them to the Winter Ranch in the Texas Hill Country.”

“Your father,” he said, “must’ve been an interesting guy.”

“You have no idea. His last project was a miniature golf course with a gold-mining theme. You saw the photo at my house. He spent two years building it. It had a working waterfall and a stream with fake gold nuggets, a lookout tower, and hole number eighteen yelled ‘Eureka’ when you got the ball in the hole.”

“Sounds sort of…weird. But fun.”

“Everyone in town used their coupon for a free round. After that, no one came back, and the tourism in Jackson didn’t spill over.”

With bittersweet remembrance, she regarded the long expanse of meadow and riverside. No trace of her father lingered here, no hint of his humor and pie-in-the-sky dreams or his wacky money-making schemes. Just the real world, rock solid. A drive-through funeral parlor where emus used to roam.

She angled the horse back onto the path and rode on, determined not to make a big deal out of this silly tour. But she felt a taut dread in her chest as they came to the place she had called home for eighteen years.

Lazy Acres Mobile Home Court, the billboard read. It was the same sign that had marked the place years ago. A cartoon cowboy, poorly rendered in peeling paint,
grinned out at her. At the bottom of the sign was written Day-Week-Month…

“Forever,” she muttered. She and her friends used to joke about it.

“Looks like the whole area’s been abandoned,” Rob said, scanning the dilapidated trailers and overgrown grass.

“And not a moment too soon.” Twyla pointed. “That one was our place.”

Rob dismounted and took hold of her reins. “Leg over, and then slide down with your belly against her side.”

He made it sound so easy, but her legs dangled in midair and the ground seemed a mile away. Then a pair of strong hands grabbed her by the waist. “Easy now,” he said gently. “I’ve got you.”

Considering their position, she couldn’t help remembering his comment about her butt, and hoped he couldn’t tell she was blushing as her feet touched the ground and she turned to face him. “Thanks,” she said. Her legs felt wobbly and strange from being on the horse.

He tethered the horses by a ditch where water ran down from the mountains. The animals dropped their heads to drink. She walked toward a double-wide with moss growing on the roof and greenish mildew streaking the textured aluminum siding. A thick, waxy vine snaked up and over the TV antenna. Several of the windows were broken or missing.

Rob was silent and thoughtful as he followed her to the old place. Beyond the valley rose Lost Horse Mountain. She didn’t look at it, but she could still picture the unnatural gouge in its granite side. That image still
haunted her. She felt Rob’s gaze on her, and it was as if he were seeing her naked.

She dared to edge a little closer to the trailer, finally stepping up on a broken cinder block and cupping her eyes to peer in through a window. Old bug-infested wooden pallets were stacked against a wall, and cobwebby garden tools leaned against the counter. “Looks like it’s been turned into a storage shed,” she said.

“What’s that up over the door?” Rob asked.

Twyla stepped down from the cinder block. She had a vivid memory of presenting the gift to her father—a horseshoe she’d found while walking home through the Barnards’ field. She had painstakingly cleaned it and stuck little sprigs of flowers through the nail holes.

“Why, that’s just the perfect thing, Twyla Jean,” her father had said. “A horseshoe’s pure luck. We’ll hang it right here over the door and have nothing but good luck from now on. And you hang it in a U-shape so the luck doesn’t fall out.”

She could hear those words as if he had whispered them into her ear a moment ago rather than years earlier. And they rang with a painful, sad irony. Each new enterprise had pushed her father further and further away from the fulfillment of his dreams. Each failure had dimmed the eager light in his eyes until finally it had been snuffed out entirely.

Twyla didn’t realize she was crying until Rob’s hand touched her cheek, catching the tear that slipped down it.

“Hey,” he said.

She flushed. “Sorry. I was thinking of my father. God, he was a fool and a dreamer, and I loved him so damned much.”

He gave her a folded bandanna from his pocket. “All the world loves a dreamer,” he said.

“But it’s the doer who gets things done,” she pointed out, dabbing her face. “You managed to do both.”

“Me?” He put his hand to his chest, regarding her incredulously.

“You dreamed it, then you became it.” On impulse she stood on tiptoe and unhooked the rusty horseshoe. “You win the prize, Dr. Carter. Congratulations.”

He took the horseshoe from her. “Don’t be so sure I’m what you think I am.”

She tilted her head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“This whole Horatio Alger, underprivileged-orphan-makes-good thing.”

“Well, aren’t you an underprivileged orphan who made good?”

“Yeah, but—”

“But nothing. You have a right to be proud of your accomplishments.”

“Whatever.” They walked in silence over to the tethered horses, and he hooked the rusty horseshoe through a loop in his saddle. “So how is it you landed in Lightning Creek, halfway across the state?” he asked.

“Mama and I wanted to make a new start somewhere.” She grimaced, remembering the whispers in church, in the grocery store. Everywhere they went, people looked at them funny, said things behind their hands.

That, she realized, had been the start of her mother’s problem. Gwen had found it easier to stay home than to go out and face what people said to her. She couldn’t take the speculation about the way her husband had died.

“I’d gotten pretty good at doing hair, so I went looking for a salon of my own, working through a business broker. The place in Lightning Creek was up for sale,
so off we went. I thought it would be good for Mama, and I guess it was, but she’s never really worked through her grief.”

She glossed over the details. She had never told anyone the whole situation. How the town had made a laughingstock of her father over the crop-dusting lawsuit brought against him by his own son-in-law. She’d never revealed his tragic response to the ridicule and his final desperate plan to keep his wife from going broke. How her mother had changed, curling up like a drying leaf and hiding, having to be tranquilized just to get her into the car. How Twyla had fought nausea and morning sickness during the drive across the state.

“It was a pretty tough year, but Mom and I did all right, all things considered.” She spoke lightly, determined to prove after the tears that she was fit company once again.

As he helped her back onto her horse, she could not guess at the thoughts behind his eyes. They were interesting eyes, a deep velvet brown that reflected outward—sunshine and summer sky—but kept the person hidden within.

No matter how hard her path had been, she knew his had been infinitely harder. Her mother had problems, but at least she had a mother. It was time, Twyla decided, to tuck the past away and move on.

She smiled, pleased with her resolve, then leaned down and stroked the mare’s neck. “I like riding a horse. I never thought I would.”

“Then let’s try something new on the ride back. I’ll show you.” He demonstrated how to get the horse up to a trot, then a canter, using heels and knees and that kissing sound, which, she was ashamed to admit, was a turn-on for her.

She found the ride both terrifying and exhilarating. The motion of the horse created an elemental heartbeat rhythm. She could feel its strength, yet there was also a perception of vulnerability, a sense that the horse was essentially a fearful animal with the instinct to flee. The pounding of hooves over earth reverberated upward, and Twyla was startled to feel it in her very center, and the feeling bordered on being unbearably sensual.

Rob rode beside her, watching, occasionally calling out a word of advice or praise for her technique. When they reached the poplar-lined trail leading to Laughing Water Lodge, Twyla let go, feeling a rush of warm summer wind over her skin and through her hair, and she felt like a kid again, carefree, with no more difficult decision to make than what to have for lunch. She knew the state was only temporary, but she loved the idea that the world was taking care of itself without her monitoring it. The horses sped up when they sensed themselves drawing close to home, so the final stretch was a smooth canter. Almost a gallop, Rob told her, impressed by her performance.

At the large stables, she looked around, still seeking a familiar face and half-afraid she’d find one. Most of the workers were too young to know her or were guests at one of the neighboring lodges.

She followed Rob to the main yard, watched him dismount and emulated him as she had earlier, wishing he was there to hold her as he had done before. When her feet hit the ground with a jolt, so did reality—she had rubber legs from all that riding.

Reaching out, she was disappointed to find that Rob’s arm wasn’t there for her to clutch at. Then she shook her head, half-ashamed of herself. She was starting to
want him near her even when she didn’t need him. A dangerous turn of events.

“Here, ma’am, let me help you with that.” A man in a Shurgood Feed cap and plaid shirt took the reins.

She thanked him, then did a double take. “Willard, is that you? Willard Stokes?”

He stepped away and eyed her, pushing back the visor of his cap. “Hey, Twyla.”

She introduced him to Rob. “Willard and I went through school together. It’s good to see you, Willard.”

“Same here.” His grin hardened a little, and his eyes narrowed. “So I guess you’re here for the big reunion.”

“That’s right.” She didn’t elaborate. She and Rob had cooked up a story, but she wasn’t ready to test it yet. And she certainly didn’t want to try it out on Willard P. Stokes, who had excelled at rumormongering during their school days.

“So will you be at the Grange Hall tonight?” she asked him.

He looked at her, then at Rob, then back at her again, and a sharp, untrustworthy glee darkened his gaze. Obviously he hadn’t changed much in ten years.

“Wouldn’t miss it, Twyla. I sure as heck wouldn’t miss it. I bet ol’ Beverly wouldn’t, either.”

At the mention of Jake’s second wife, Twyla glimpsed the old Willard in his face. The one who had never been able to resist a scandal.

And despite the beating warmth of day, Twyla shivered.